TV Review : ‘After the Warming’: Entertaining Ecology

“After the Warming,” hosted and written by British journalist James Burke, combines scientific research with imagination and high-tech creativity to produce the best entry yet in this year’s TV tide of environmental specials.

Airing at 8 tonight on Channels 28 and 15 and at 9 on Channels 24 and 50, the two-hour program takes the abstract concept of the climatic catastrophe known as “global warming,” explains it clearly, personalizes it and lays it on our collective U.S. doorstep with a realistic prescription for correction.

“After the Warming” has a gimmick. It opens as an evening news program, looking back from the future, in the year 2050. The first hour traces the influence of weather on key sociological developments in history--what the weather did to civilization. The second hour, starting in 1990 and still “looking back,” concentrates on what civilization is doing to the weather, as the industrialized nations pump increasing loads of carbon dioxide and other warming, “greenhouse” gases into the lower atmosphere.

“After the Warming” has a happy ending. Its prediction for 2050 is that effective global programs of fossil-fuel taxes, international exchange of carbon-use credits and development of alternative, renewable energy sources have created a world that is clean, efficient, reusable and community-conscious.

Science fiction? Not necessarily. Burke contends that solutions to the environmental crisis are ready to be put in place if the United States, which continues to hesitate on a full-fledged commitment to global action, would acknowledge the gravity of the situation. He thinks it is only a matter of time.